Social constructionism and social constructivism are sociological theories of knowledge that consider how social phenomena or objects of consciousness develop in social contexts. A social construction (social construct) is a concept or practice that is the construct (or cultural artifact) of a particular group. When we say that something is socially constructed, we are focusing on its dependence on contingent variables of our social selves rather than any inherent quality that it possesses in itself. The underlying assumptions on which social constructivism is typically seen to be based are reality, knowledge, and learning.[1]

Social constructs are generally understood to be the by-products of countless human choices rather than laws resulting from divine will or nature. This is not usually taken to imply a radical anti-determinism, however. Social constructionism is usually opposed to essentialism, which instead defines specific phenomena in terms of inherent and transhistorical essences independent of conscious beings that determine the categorical structure of reality.[2]

A major focus of social constructionism is to uncover the ways in which individuals and groups participate in the construction of their perceived social reality. It involves looking at the ways social phenomena are created, institutionalized, known, and made into tradition by humans. The social construction of reality is an ongoing, dynamic process that is (and must be) reproduced by people acting on their interpretations and their knowledge of it. Because social constructs as facets of reality and objects of knowledge are not "given" by nature, they must be constantly maintained and re-affirmed in order to persist. This process also introduces the possibility of change: what "justice" is and what it means shifts from one generation to the next.

Ian Hacking noted in "The Social Construction of What?" that social construction talk is often in reference not only to worldly items, like things and facts – but also to beliefs about them.[3] It is relevant to note that this perspective is often correctly closely connected with many contemporary theories, perhaps most notably the developmental theories of Lev Vygotsky and Jerome Bruner.[1]

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Social constructionism vs. social constructivism

Although both social constructionism and social constructivism deal with ways in which social phenomena develop, they are distinct. Social constructionism refers to the development of phenomena relative to social contexts while social constructivism refers to an individual's making meaning of knowledge within a social context (Vygotsky 1978). For this reason, social constructionism is typically described as a sociological concept whereas social constructivism is typically described as a psychological concept. However, while distinct, they are also complementary aspects of a single process through which humans in society create their worlds and, thereby, themselves.

Social constructivism has been studied by many educational psychologists, who are concerned with its implications for teaching and learning. For more on the psychological dimensions of social constructivism, see the work of Ernst von Glasersfeld and A. Sullivan Palincsar.[4]

Constructionism became prominent in the U.S. with Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann's 1966 book, The Social Construction of Reality. Berger and Luckmann argue that all knowledge, including the most basic, taken-for-granted common sense knowledge of everyday reality, is derived from and maintained by social interactions. When people interact, they do so with the understanding that their respective perceptions of reality are related, and as they act upon this understanding their common knowledge of reality becomes reinforced. Since this common sense knowledge is negotiated by people, human typifications, significations and institutions come to be presented as part of an objective reality, particularly for future generations who were not involved in the original process of negotiation. For example, as parents negotiate rules for their children to follow, those rules confront the children as externally produced "givens" that they cannot change. Berger and Luckmann's social constructionism has its roots in phenomenology. It links to Heidegger and Edmund Husserl through the teaching of Alfred Schutz, who was also Berger's PhD adviser.

Social constructionism and personal construct psychology

Since its appearance in the 1950s, personal construct psychology (PCP) has mainly developed as a constructivist theory of personality and a system of transforming individual meaning-making processes, largely in therapeutic contexts ([7];[8];[9];[10];[11];[12]). It was based around the notion of persons as scientists who form and test theories about their worlds. Therefore, it represented one of the first attempts to appreciate the constructive nature of experience and the meaning persons give to their experience ([13]). Social constructionism (SC), on the other hand, mainly developed as a form of a critique ([14]), aimed to transform the oppressing effects of the social meaning-making processes. Over the years, it has grown into a cluster of different approaches ([15]), with no single SC position ([16]). However, different approaches under the generic term of SC are loosely linked by some shared assumptions about language, knowledge, and reality ([17]).

A usual way of thinking about the relationship between PCP and SC is treating them as two separate entities that are similar in some aspects, but also very different in others. This way of conceptualizing this relationship is a logical result of the circumstantial differences of their emergence. In subsequent analyses these differences between PCP and SC were framed around several points of tension, formulated as binary oppositions: personal/social; individualist/relational; agency/structure; constructivist/constructionist ([18];[19];[20];[21];[22];[23]). Although some of the most important issues in contemporary psychology are elaborated in these contributions, the polarized positioning also sustained the idea of a separation between PCP and SC, paving the way for only limited opportunities for dialogue between them ([24]).

Reframing the relationship between PCP and SC may be of use in both the PCP and the SC communities. On one hand, it extends and enriches SC theory and points to benefits of applying the PCP “toolkit” in constructionist therapy and research. On the other hand, the reframing contributes to PCP theory and points to new ways of addressing social construction in therapeutic conversations ([25]).

The teleology of social construction

The concepts of weak and strong as applied to opposing philosophical positions, "isms", inform a teleology, the goal oriented, meaningful, or final end of a mode of interpretation of reality. "Isms" are not personal opinions, but the extreme, modal, formulations that actual persons, individuals, can then consider, and take a position between. There are opposing philosophical positions concerning the feasibility of co-creating a common, shared, social reality, called weak and strong.

John R. Searle does not elucidate the terms strong and weak in his book The Construction of Social Reality, but he clearly uses them in his Chinese room argument, where he debates the feasibility of creating a computing machine with a sharable understanding of reality, and he adds "We are precisely such machines."Strong artificial intelligence (Strong AI) is the bet that computer programmers will somehow eventually achieve a computing machine with a mind of its own, and that it will eventually be more powerful than a human mind. Weak AI bets they won't.

David Deutch in his book The Fabric of Reality uses a form of strongTuring principle to share Frank Tipler's view of the final state of the universe as an omnipotent (but not omniscient), Omega point, computer. But this computer is a society of creative thinkers, or people (albeit posthuman transhuman persons), having debates in order to generate information, in the never-ending attempt to attain omniscience of this physicsTemplate:Mdashits evolutionary forms, its computational abilities, and the methods of its epistemologyTemplate:Mdashhaving an eternity to do so. (p. 356)

Because both the Chinese room argument and the construction of social reality deal with Searle and his debates, and because they both use weak and strong to denote a philosophical position, and because both debate the programmability of "the other", it is worth noting the correspondence that "strong AI" is strong social constructionism, and "weak AI" is weak social constructivism.

Strong social constructivism says "none are able to communicate either a full reality or an accurate ontology, therefore my position must impose, by a sort of divine right, my observer-relative epistemology", whereas weak social constructivism says "none are able to know a full reality, therefore we must cooperate, informing and conveying an objective ontology as best we can."

Weak teleology

Weak social constructionism sees the underlying, objective, "brute factual", elements of the class of languages and functional assignments of human, metaphysical, reality. Brute facts are all facts that are not institutional (metaphysical, social agreement) facts. The skeptic portrays the weak aspect of social constructivism, and want to spend effort debating the institutional realities.

Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker[26] writes that "some categories really are social constructions: they exist only because people tacitly agree to act as if they exist. Examples include money, tenure, citizenship, decorations for bravery, and the presidency of the United States."

In a similar vein, Stanley Fish[27] has suggested that baseball's "balls and strikes" are social constructions.[28]

Both Fish and Pinker agree that the sorts of objects indicated here can be described as part of what John Searle calls "social reality".[29] In particular, they are, in Searle's terms, ontologicallysubjective but epistemologicallyobjective.[30] "Social facts" are temporally, ontologically, and logically dependent on "brute facts." For example, "money" in the form of its raw materials (rag, pulp, ink) as constituted socially for barter (for example by a banking system) is a social fact of "money" by virtue of (i) collectively willing and intending (ii) to impose some particular function (purpose for which), (iii) by constitutive rules atop the "brute facts." "Social facts have the remarkable feature of having no analogue among physical brute facts" (34). The existence of language is itself constitutive of the social fact (37), which natural or brute facts do not require. Natural or "brute" facts exist independently of language; thus a "mountain" is a mountain in every language and in no language; it simply is what it is.[31]

Searle illustrates the evolution of social facts from brute facts by the constitutive rule: X counts as Y in C. "The Y terms has to assign a new status that the object does not already have just in virtue of satisfying the Y term; and there has to be collective agreement, or at least acceptance, both in the imposition of that status on the stuff referred to by the X term and about the function that goes with that status. Furthermore, because the physical features brute facts specified by the X term are insufficient by themselves to guarantee the fulfillment of the assigned function specified by the Y term, the new status and its attendant functions have to be the sort of things that can be constituted by collective agreement or acceptance."[32]

It is true that language is not a "brute fact", that it is an institutional fact, a human convention, a metaphysical reality (that happens to be physically uttered), but Searle points out that there are language-independent thoughts "noninstitutional, primitive, biological inclinations and cognitions not requiring any linguistic devises", and that there are many "brute facts" amongst both humans and animals that are truths that should not be altered in the social constructs because language does not truly constitute them, despite the attempt to institute them for any group's gain: money and property are language dependent, but desires (thirst, hunger) and emotions (fear, rage) are not.[33] (Descartes describes the difference between imagination as a sort of vision, or image, and intellect as conceptualizing things by symbolic manipulation.) Therefore, there is doubt that society or a computer can be completely programmed by language and images, (because there is a programmable, emotive effect of images that derives from the language of judgment towards images).

Finally, against the strong theory and for the weak theory, Searle insists, "it could not be the case, as some have maintained, that all facts are institutional [i.e., social] facts, that there are no brute facts, because the structure of institutional facts reveals that they are logically dependent on brute facts. To suppose that all facts are institutional [i.e., social] would produce an infinite regress or circularity in the account of institutional facts. In order that some facts be institutional, there must be other facts that are brute [i.e., physical, biological, natural]. This is the consequence of the logical structure of institutional facts."[34]

Ian Hacking, Canadian philosopher of science, insists, "the notion that everything is socially constructed has been going the rounds. John Searle [1995] argues vehemently (and in my opinion cogently) against universal constructionism".[35] "Universal social constructionism is descended from the doctrine that I once named linguistic idealism and attributed, only half in jest, to Richard Nixon [Hacking, 1975, p. 182]. Linguistic idealism is the doctrine that only what is talked about exists, nothing has reality until it is spoken of, or written about. This extravagant notion is descended from Berkeley's idea-ism, which we call idealism: the doctrine that all that exists is mental".[36] "They are a part of what John Searle [1995] calls social reality. His book is titled the Construction of Social Reality, and as I explained elsewhere [Hacking, 1996], that is not a social construction book at all".[37]

Hacking observes, "the label 'social constructionism' is more code than description"[38] of every Leftist, Marxist, Freudian, and Feminist PostModernist to call into question every moral, sex, gender, power, and deviant claim as just another essentialist claim—including the claim that members of the male and female sex are inherently different, rather than historically and socially constructed. Hacking observes that his 1995 simplistic dismissal of the concept actually revealed to many readers the outrageous implications of the theorists: Is child abuse a real evil, or a social construct, asked Hacking? His dismissive attitude, "gave some readers a way to see that there need be no clash between construction and reality",[39] inasmuch as "the metaphor of social construction once had excellent shock value, but now it has become tired".[40]

Informally, they require human practices to sustain their existence, but they have an effect that is (basically) universally agreed upon. The disagreement lies in whether this category should be called "socially constructed". Ian Hacking[41] argues that it should not. Furthermore, it is not clear that authors who write "social construction" analyses ever mean "social construction" in Pinker's sense.[citation needed] If they never do, then Pinker (probably among others) has misunderstood the point of a social constructionist argument.

To understand how weak social constructionism can conclude that metaphysics (a human affair) is not the entire "reality", see the arguments against the study metaphysics. Kant similarly argues there are realities we cannot ever know, and therefore cannot ever tell of. This inability to accurately share the full reality, even given time for a rational conversation, is similarly proclaimed by weak artificial intelligence.

Strong teleology

Strong social constructionism sees everything as a social construction, everything as metaphysical. This is not to say that it sees the outer world as having beings in a non-reality, as unreal. Rather, it proposes that the notions of "real" and "unreal" are themselves social constructs, so that the question of whether anything is "real" is just a matter of social convention.[citation needed] The conservative proponent of institutions the way they are progressing, would, in Rudolph Carnap's words "pretend to teach knowledge which is of a higher level than that of empirical science." Everyone else has their own reality, and take the stance that "if you have to ask, you would not understand."

Strong social constructionists oppose the existence of "brute" facts. That a mountain is a mountain (as opposed to just another undifferentiated clump of earth) is socially engendered, and not a brute fact. That the concept of mountain is universally admitted in all human languages reflects near-universal human consensus, but does not make it an objective reality; similarly for all apparently real objects and events: trees, cars, snow, collisions.
It reasons that all reality is thought, all thought is in a language, all language is a convention, and that all convention is socially acceptable, hence, it uses language to socially program.

A Strong social constructionism entity convenes and forms the conventions of consensus reality, a real, human operated set of social programs, whose subjects participate in operating on the "real" to the extent they conform democratically and politely. If its ontology is accused, the pragmatic answer is "read the minutes of the meeting", both because the strong social constructionism is busy creating programs, and because sharing a reality accurately and completely is futile.

Also, in regards to Broadcast History, 'social construction' refers to the way in which the media form has been created. This relates both to its structure and regulation. It's the way that the social media outlet is constructed by our society.

The anatomy of a social constructionist analysis

"Social construction" may mean many things to many people. Ian Hacking, having examined a wide range of books and articles with titles of the form "The social construction of X" or "Constructing X", argues that when something is said to be "socially constructed", this is shorthand for at least the following two claims:

(0) In the present state of affairs, X is taken for granted; X appears to be inevitable.[42]

(1) X need not have existed, or need not be at all as it is. X, or X as it is at present, is not determined by the nature of things; it is not inevitable.[43]

Hacking adds that the following claims are also often, though not always, implied by the use of the phrase "social construction":

(2) X is quite bad as it is.

(3) We would be much better off if X were done away with, or at least radically transformed.[44]

Thus a claim that gender is socially constructed probably means that gender, as currently understood, is not an inevitable result of biology, but highly contingent on social and historical processes. In addition, depending on who is making the claim, it may mean that our current understanding of gender is harmful, and should be modified or eliminated, to the extent possible.

According to Hacking, "social construction" claims are not always clear about exactly what isn't "inevitable", or exactly what "should be done away with." Consider a hypothetical claim that quarks are "socially constructed". On one reading, this means that quarks themselves are not "inevitable" or "determined by the nature of things." On another reading, this means that our idea (or conceptualization, or understanding) of quarks is not "inevitable" or "determined by the nature of things".[45]

Hacking is much more sympathetic to the second reading than the first.[46] Furthermore, he argues that, if the second reading is taken, there need not always be a conflict between saying that quarks are "socially constructed" and saying that they are "real".[47] In our gender example, this means that while a legitimate biological basis for gender may exist, some of society's perceptions of gender may be socially constructed.

The stronger first position, however, is more-or-less an inevitable corollary of Willard Van Orman Quine's concept of ontological relativity, and particularly of the Duhem-Quine thesis. That is, according to Quine and like-minded thinkers (who are not usually characterized as social constructionists) there is no single privileged explanatory framework that is closest to "the things themselves"—every theory has merit only in proportion to its explanatory power. [citation needed]

As we step from the phrase to the world of human beings, "social construction" analyses can become more complex. Hacking briefly examines Helène Moussa’s analysis of the social construction of "women refugees".[48] According to him, Moussa's argument has several pieces, some of which may be implicit:

Canadian citizens' idea of "the woman refugee" is not inevitable, but historically contingent. (Thus the idea or category "the woman refugee" can be said to be "socially constructed".)

Women coming to Canada to seek asylum are profoundly affected by the category of "the woman refugee". Among other things, if a woman does not "count" as a "woman refugee" according to the law, she may be deported, and forced to return to very difficult conditions in her homeland.

Such women may modify their behavior, and perhaps even their attitudes towards themselves, in order to gain the benefits of being classified as a "woman refugee".

If such a woman does not modify her behavior, she should be considered un-Canadian and as such should not be admitted to citizenship.

Hacking suggests that this third part of the analysis, the "interaction" between a socially constructed category and the individuals that are actually or potentially included in that category, is present in many "social construction" analyses involving types of human beings.

Environmental Leftist social constructionism

The Postmodern social construction of nature is a theory of postmodernist continental philosophy that poses an alternative critique of previous mainstream, promethean dialogue about environmental sustainability and ecopolitics. Whereas traditional criticisms of environmentalism come from the more conservative "right" of politics, leftist critiques of nature pioneered by postmodernist constructionism highlight the need to recognise "the other". The implicit assumption made by theorists like Wapner[49][50] is that a new "response to eco-criticism would require critics to acknowledge the ways in which they themselves silence nature and then to respect the sheer otherness of the nonhuman world."

This is because postmodernism prides itself on criticizing the urge toward mastery that characterizes modernity. But mastery is exactly what postmodernism is exerting as it captures the nonhuman world within its own conceptual domain. That in turn implies postmodern cultural criticism can deepen the modernist urge toward mastery by eliminating the ontological weight of the nonhuman world. "What else could it mean to assert that there is no such thing as nature?".[51] Thus, the issue becomes an existentialist query about whether nature can exist in a humanist critique, and whether we can discern the "other's" views in relation to our actions on their behalf. This theorem has come to be known as "The Wapner Paradigm."

↑Pinch, T. J. (1996). The Social Construction of Technology: a Review. In R. Fox (Ed.), Technological Change; Methods and Themes in the History of Technology (pp. 17 - 35). Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.

↑Wesel, M. v. (2006). Why we do not always get what we want; The power imbalance in the Social Shaping of Technology (final draft 29 June 2006). Unpublished Master Thesis, Universiteit Maastricht, Maastricht (Look for the latest version here).

↑The distinction between "quarks themselves" and "our idea (or conceptualization, or understanding) of quarks" will undoubtedly trouble some with a philosophical bent. Hacking's distinction is based on an intuitive metaphysics, with a split between things out in the world, on one hand, and ideas thereof in our minds, on the other. Hacking is less advocating a serious, particular metaphysics than suggesting a useful way to analyze claims about "social construction". (Hacking, Ian. The Social Construction of What? . Harvard University Press, 1999; ISBN 0-674-00412-4, p. 21-24)